Dana Blankenhorn writes a smart blog post on fascism and the role of tech companies.

Putin hacked the Internet because the people with power over the media refused to accept their responsibility for maintaining its values. Google and Facebook (and smaller companies, like Twitter), declared they were not media companies, that they were mere transports like the phone networks. They said this because they didn’t want the cost of being responsible for something as expensive to maintain as the national discourse. It doesn’t scale.

But lies scale. Propaganda scales. Memes scale. Advertisements scale. These are the tools the fascists used to obtain power, and no one stepped in to stop them. Then, after the fascists had seized power, democrats and Democrats turned on Facebook and Google, demanding they be “regulated” in the public interest. By whom? By the same fascist government that had just seized power?